Bisphenol-A

...r BPA molecule, a type of plastic found in all kinds of products including baby bottles, plastic food containers, Nalgene bottles, some wines (from the plastic stoppers and the lining of fermentation tanks) and the lining in metal cans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s safe, a viewpoint contradicted by at least 100 studies. The problem: BPA is a endocrine disruptor linked to a host of problems, according to some researchers, includi...

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How to Cook Broadleaf Plantain

...as a fresh poultice on itchy bites and hives. But eating it? Meh. I’ll put baby leaves in a salad. Erik has sprinkled the leaves on pizzas--and I’ll eat anything on a pizza. The seeds can be collected and used in seedy applications. But all in all, the flavor and tough texture of plantain left me uninspired. Trust Pascal to figure out how to cook the stuff. He boiled it, testing often, and found a sweet spot: the exact time it takes to boil out of...

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Citified Parched Corn

...Then I put the nibblets in our fancy electric dehydrator. I dried a bag of baby green peas while I was at it, because I thought they might parch nicely, too. Fresh frozen corn is, obviously, very different than dried-on-the-cob corn. The fresh kernels are sliced off the cob, so they are open ended. They are missing the white part, the germ. Whole dried corn kernels will look more like popcorn kernels. And as they are whole, they act a little like...

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Cactus Thief Strikes Again

...dered another extreme strategy: shower the cactus thief with free flats of baby cacti. The latter strategy could even lead to the first ever Root Simple Upworthy style clickbait headline, “Thief Steals Cactus and the Thorny Response Will Have You in Tears.” Stoic philosopher Epictetus set me straight on what I should really do. He says, “Stop admiring your clothes and you are not angry at the man who steals them . . . our losses and our pains have...

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Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

...ies, and are hard to fool. Some notes on hemlock: I’ve always been wary of baby hemlock. It likes to grow where chickweed grows, so its easy to pull up a few hemlock sprouts along with young chickweed, and it doesn’t take much fresh hemlock in your salad to make you very sick. The main poison in hemlock coniine, which is similar to nicotine in both its chemical structure and pharmacological properties. It takes about 100 mg of coniine to kill an a...

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